NEHAWU response to the statement by President Cyril Ramaphosa on further economic and social measures in response to Covid-19 epidemic
22 April 2020
The National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) notes the economic and social measures announced by President Ramaphosa to the nation last night.
The impact of the combined global capitalist crisis and COVID-19 pandemic is likely to plunge all regions, including Africa, into recession as forecast by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the last few months since the outbreak of COVID-19 the developing economies, including South Africa, have witnessed massive capital outflows.
In South Africa, we are in a worse predicament as our economy was already pushed into a technical recession when the Coronavirus outbreak was announced. This is the third technical recession since the start of the implementation of the misguided austerity programme in 2015 - that has failed to achieve its targets in terms of reducing the budget-deficit and public-debt. The Treasury’s current Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) announced during the Budget Speech by Tito Mboweni disgracefully departed from the macroeconomic framework outlined in the 2019 ANC election manifesto.
With deep fiscal cuts particularly singling-out the public service workers under the Public Service Coordinating Bargaining Council (PSCBC) and other social cuts such as in public railway transport, Mboweni MTEF was destined to plunge the economy to even deeper depths of recession – and thus creating yet another round of a vicious cycle of economic contraction, followed by revenue shortfalls and then more borrowing at rising premium. In the event, the price of this austerity programme was the junk-status downgrade of the country’s sovereign rating by Moody’s, which effectively put paid to the Treasury’s MTEF.